by Laurie Block
When Chagall came to Paris he grew thin. Dressed in black, he tucked his daily bread and the paper under his armpit, spent his free nights in argument and cognac at small round tables, made love to tragic singers with bloodred lips and nowhere to go. He changed his name. When Chagall landed in Paris he lost himself like an animal loses the forest. With nothing to cling to, his senses swam over the horizon. This was not his October. The clouds hung off kilter, no bells rang true, the stars and bread and women all smelled wrong. Chagall closed his eyes. Gazing at Russia, he bit his lip until the blood ran, until he could taste the wounded wet clay of Vitebsk, the strong humorous suck of his boots beside the well, the gutteral cluck of savage slavic chickens and big-assed Babas who could not, would not keep still no matter how many teeth remained to chew. My god they complained, they specialized in opera, in suffering that was splendid and joyous and fresh daily. You could taste their trouble, oy, oy, you could sing along. The Evil Eye, a pinch of salt and people counting on garlic and prayer and next year, who knows, the Messiah or the Czar descending sure as sunset in boots. Every house a place of honour and whitewash, lye soap, children scrubbed and miserable as potatoes with eyes open in the dark and song, the ungovernable voice rising behind unpainted shutters. A call for bread and justice, the cry of freedom and young love on the run, rolling around in the rhubarb, inventing itself yet again. A new century, the new man going underground. Chagall was no hero. In Paris, he still believed in the order of material things. Among his rags and brushes he pictured the revolution as a dance with no end, the heart-rending reel after perfection, a blind brutal stomp with babies asleep and butterflies on their eyelids, the unexpected delicacy and exquisite blue sadness as night fell on the Bois and the boulevard and his feet kept time, the sweetness of the sacred instrument as he made his peace with the earth. In Paris, memory struck a single bell like a boat sounding midnight waters for rocks, for signs of the submerged city with its glistening swimmers. Chagall at the wheel of this wet woolen world heads east across a night sky alive with drunken chairs and ecstatic roosters, with sacred scrolls and stories of love salvaged from burning buildings, he paints his way home. In Paris, Chagall joined the parade of passionate faces with jewelled beards and starry eyes. He was human, he was animal, he didn't need the sun to find the road back home.